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Escape from Sobibor | |
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Genre | Drama History War |
Teleplay by | Reginald Rose |
Story by | Thomas Blatt Richard Rashke Stanislaw Szmajzner |
Directed by | Jack Gold |
Starring | Alan Arkin Joanna Pacuła Rutger Hauer Hartmut Becker Jack Shepherd |
Narrated by | Howard K. Smith |
Music by | Georges Delerue |
Country of origin | United Kingdom Yugoslavia |
Original language | English |
Production | |
Executive producer | Martin Starger |
Producers | Dennis E. Doty Howard P. Alston |
Cinematography | Ernest Vincze |
Editor | Keith Palmer |
Running time | 176 minutes (UK/ITV; 169 minutes with PAL speed-up) 143 minutes (US/CBS) 120 minutes (edited) |
Production companies | Zenith Entertainment Rule Starger (for Central) |
Original release | |
Network | ITV |
Release | 10 May 1987 |
Escape from Sobibor is a 1987 British television film which aired on ITV and CBS. [1] It is the story of the mass escape from the Nazi extermination camp at Sobibor, the most successful uprising by Jewish prisoners of German extermination camps (uprisings also took place at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka). The film was directed by Jack Gold and shot in Avala, Yugoslavia (now Serbia). The full 176-minute version shown in the UK [note 1] on 10 May 1987 was pre-empted by a 143-minute version shown in the United States on 12 April 1987.
The script, by Reginald Rose, was based on Richard Rashke's 1983 book of the same name, [2] along with a manuscript by Thomas Blatt, "From the Ashes of Sobibor", and a book by Stanisław Szmajzner, Inferno in Sobibor. [3] Alan Arkin, Joanna Pacuła, and Rutger Hauer were the primary stars of the film. The film received a Golden Globe Award for Best Miniseries or Television Film [4] and Hauer received a Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role—Television Film or Miniseries. [5] Esther Raab [6] [7] was a camp survivor who had assisted Rashke with his book and served as a technical consultant. [8]
On 14 October 1943, members of the Sobibor camp's underground resistance killed 11 German SS-Totenkopfverbände officers and a number of Sonderdienst Ukrainian and Volksdeutsche guards. Of the 600 inmates in the camp, roughly 300 escaped, although all but 50–70 were later re-captured and killed. [9] After the escape, the SS Chief, Heinrich Himmler, ordered the death camp closed. It was dismantled, bulldozed under the earth and planted over with trees to cover it up. [10]
The film begins with a new trainload of Polish Jews arriving for processing at Sobibor. The German Commandant gives them a welcome speech, assuring the new arrivals that the place is a work camp. Other SS officers move along the assembled lines of prisoners, selecting a small number who have trade skills (such as goldsmiths, seamstresses, shoemakers, and tailors). The remaining prisoners are sent away to a different part of the camp from which a pillar of smoke rises day and night. It is some time before the new prisoners realise that Sobibor is a death camp; all of the other Jews are exterminated in gas chambers, and their corpses are cremated in large ovens. The small number of prisoners kept alive in the other part of the camp are charged with sorting the belongings taken from those who are murdered and then repairing the shoes, recycling the clothing, and melting down any silver or gold to make jewellery for the SS officers. Despite their usefulness, these surviving prisoners' existence is precarious; beatings and murders can occur at any time.
Gustav Wagner is the most clever and sadistic of the German officers. When two prisoners escape from a work detail in the nearby forest, Wagner forces the remaining thirteen prisoners of the work gang to each select one other prisoner to die with them (under the threat that if they refuse, he will select fifty) and then executes all twenty six.
The leader of the prisoners, Leon Feldhendler, realises that when the trains eventually stop coming, the camp will have outlived its usefulness, and all the remaining Jews will be murdered. He devises a plan for every prisoner to escape, by luring the SS officers and NCOs into the prisoners' barracks and work huts one by one and killing them as quietly as possible. Once all the Germans are dead, the prisoners will assemble into columns and simply march out of the camp as if they have been ordered to, and it is hoped that the Ukrainian Guards, not knowing what is going on, and with no Germans left alive to give orders or raise the alarm, will not interfere. A new group of prisoners arrives: Red Army prisoners who are Russian Jews. Their leader, Sasha Pechersky and his men willingly join the revolt, their military skills proving invaluable.
The Camp Kommandant leaves for several days, taking Wagner with him, which proves an advantage as the most sadistic of the SS officers will be absent. On 14 October 1943, the plan goes into action. One by one, SS officers and NCOs are lured into traps set by groups of prisoners armed with knives and clubs. Eleven Germans are killed, but one officer, Karl Frenzel, unwittingly evades his killers, discovers the corpse of one of his colleagues, and raises the alarm. By now, the prisoners have assembled on the parade ground and, realising the plan has been discovered, Pechersky and Feldhendler urge the prisoners to revolt and flee the camp. Most of the 600 prisoners run for the perimeter fences, some of the Jews using captured rifles to shoot their way through the Ukrainian guards. Other guards open fire with machine guns from observation towers, cutting many of the fleeing prisoners down, and other escapees are killed on the minefield surrounding the camp, over 300 Jews reach the forest and escape.
As the survivors flee deeper into the forest, famed newscaster Howard K. Smith narrates the fates that befell some of the survivors on whose accounts the film was based. Of the 300 prisoners who escaped, only approximately 50 survived to see the end of the war in 1945. Pechersky makes it back to Soviet lines and rejoins the Red Army, surviving the war, and Feldhendler lives to see the end of the war but is killed shortly afterwards in a clash with anti-semitic Poles. Sergeant Wagner escapes to Brazil, where he is found stabbed to death in 1980. After the uprising, which was the largest escape from a prison camp of any kind in Europe during World War II, Sobibor was bulldozed to the ground, and trees were planted on the site to remove any sign of its existence.
In credits order:
Sobibor was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Reinhard. It was located in the forest near the village of Żłobek Duży in the General Government region of German-occupied Poland.
Gustav Franz Wagner was an Austrian member of the SS with the rank of Staff sergeant (Oberscharführer). Wagner was a deputy commander of Sobibor extermination camp in German-occupied Poland, where 200,000-250,000 Jews were murdered in the camp's gas chambers during Operation Reinhard. Due to his brutality, he was known as "The Beast" and "Wolf".
Thomas "Toivi" Blatt was a Holocaust survivor, writer of mémoires, and public speaker, who at the age of 16 escaped from the Sobibór extermination camp during the uprising staged by the Jewish prisoners in October 1943. The escape was attempted by about 300 inmates, many of whom were recaptured and killed by the German search squads. Following World War II Blatt lived in Communist Poland until the Polish October. In 1957, he emigrated to Israel, and in 1958 settled in the United States.
Karl August Wilhelm Frenzel was an SS noncommissioned officer in Sobibor extermination camp.
Alexander "Sasha" Aronovich Pechersky, also known as Oleksandr Aronovych Pecherskyi, was a Jewish-Soviet officer. He is one of the organizers, and the leader, of the most successful uprising and mass-escape of Jews from a Nazi extermination camp during World War II, which occurred at the Sobibor extermination camp on 14 October 1943.
Leon Felhendler was a Polish resistance fighter known for his role in organizing the 1943 prisoner uprising at Sobibor extermination camp together with Alexander Pechersky.
Hermann Michel, sometimes referred to as "Preacher", was a Nazi and SS-Oberscharführer. During World War II, he participated in the extermination of Jews at the Sobibór extermination camp during the Nazi operation known as Aktion Reinhard. According to the Majdanek Museum, a different person named Hermann Michel, born 23.04.1912 in Passau, served at Buchenwald, Majdanek and Sachsenhausen. This person was killed in 1944.
Heinz Kurt Bolender was an SS sergeant during the Nazi era. In 1942, he operated the gas chambers at Sobibór extermination camp, perpetrating acts of genocide against Jews and Romani people during Operation Reinhard. After the war, Bolender was recognized in 1961 while working under a false identity as a doorman at a nightclub in West Germany, and subsequently accused in 1965 of personally murdering at least 360 Jewish inmates and assisting in the murder of 86,000 more at Sobibór. He died by suicide in prison two months prior to the end of the trial.
Erich Bauer, sometimes referred to as "Gasmeister", was a low-level commander in the Schutzstaffel (SS) of Nazi Germany and a Holocaust perpetrator. He participated in Action T4 program and later in Operation Reinhard, when he was a gas chamber operator at Sobibór extermination camp. In 1950 he was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment.
Johann Niemann was a German SS officer and Holocaust perpetrator who was deputy commandant of Sobibor extermination camp during Operation Reinhard. He also served as a Leichenverbrenner at Grafeneck, Brandenburg, and Bernburg during the Aktion T4, the SS "euthanasia" program. Niemann was killed during the Sobibor prisoner uprising in 1943.
Heinrich Arthur Matthes was a German SS commander during the Nazi era. He served as a deputy commandant of Treblinka extermination camp during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust in Poland. Matthes was appointed chief of the extermination area at Camp 2 where the gas chambers were built and managed by the SS personnel overseeing some 300 slave labourers disposing of corpses under penalty of death. He was tried in the 1964 Treblinka trials, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The SS command of Auschwitz concentration camp refers to those units, commands, and agencies of the German SS which operated and administered during World War II. Due to its large size and key role in the Nazi genocide program, the Auschwitz Concentration Camp encompassed personnel from several different branches of the SS, some of which held overlapping and shared areas of responsibility.
Rudolf Beckmann was a German SS-Oberscharführer in the Sobibor extermination camp. He was stabbed to death during the uprising in Sobibor by inmates. Beckmann was a member of the Nazi Party and the Schutzstaffel. Nothing is known about his early life.
The Sobibor trial was a 1965–66 judicial trial in the West German prosecution of SS officers who had worked at Sobibor extermination camp; it was held in Hagen. It was one of a series of similar war crime trials held during the early and mid-1960s, such as the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann by Israel in Jerusalem, and the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials of 1963–65, also held in West Germany. These trials heightened general public and international understanding of the extent of the crimes that had been perpetrated in occupied Poland some twenty years earlier by Nazi bureaucrats and persons acting as their executioners.
Richard L. Rashke is an American journalist, teacher and author, who has written non-fiction books, as well as plays and screenplays. He is especially known for his history, Escape from Sobibor, first published in 1982, an account of the mass escape in October 1943 of hundreds of Jewish prisoners from the extermination camp at Sobibor in German-occupied Poland. The book was adapted as a 1987 TV movie by the same name.
SS-SturmbannführerKarl Steubl, Steubel, or Steibel was a Nazi, perpetrator of euthanasia programme dubbed Action T4, and commander of transportation at the Sobibór extermination camp during Operation Reinhard, the most deadly phase of the Holocaust. Arrested after the war in Europe ended, Steubl committed suicide in Linz, Austria.
Sobibor is a 2018 Russian war drama film co-written, directed by and starring Konstantin Khabensky. The picture also stars Christopher Lambert and was released on 3 May 2018 in Russia. It was selected as the Russian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards, but it was not nominated. It received generally positive reviews from critics.
Stanisław "Szlomo" Szmajzner was one of 58 known survivors of the Sobibór extermination camp in German-occupied Poland and participated in the 1943 camp-wide revolt and escape from Sobibór. He was born in Puławy, Poland and died in Goiânia, Brazil.
Hela Felenbaum-Weiss was one of the few survivors of the Sobibor extermination camp and a decorated partisan fighter in the Soviet Red Army.
The Sobibor Uprising was a revolt of about 600 prisoners that occurred on October 14, 1943, during World War II and the Holocaust at the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland. It was the second uprising in an extermination camp, partly successful, by Jewish prisoners against the SS forces, following the revolt in Treblinka.